HoSARC at the NYC Maker Faire Sept 25 & 26

The New York Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club will be running an exhibit on Satellite communications at the New York Maker Faire on Sept 25 & 26 2010. Our exhibit will cover Home Brew HF stations, our "Go Box" portable stations and live Satellite communications as propagation permits. There will be a special QSL card made just for the occasion and we are looking forward to spreading the word on Amateur Radio to like minded "Makers".

The Maker Faire  has been around since 2006 and like its namesake the Make magazine it celebrates  "arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset." These are all interests near and dear to any HAM's heart. If you have time this weekend, and you are in the New York area, please come on down. It promises to be quite a show.

FieldDay 2010 Photos.

Here are a few pictures taken during the HoSARC 2010 ARRL Fieldday. We had a great time and made many contacts, amid the wind and the occasional pileups.

Field Day 2010

Everyone at HoSARC has put in a lot of time working on this Field Day and it looks like this year will be a great event for the club. We have BBQs dipoles, mono-band Yagis and tons of food. Should be fun.
73,
Patrick KC2RBE

Amateur Radio way to prove you are a human.

I was sending a web based E-mail comment about something on the TAPR website and noticed their clever method of "proving you are a human" to prevent spam. The likelihood of an web based CW skimming E-mail spambot is pretty slim, so this looks like a very secure amateur radio based feature for a website. I have always heard that the simplest solutions can be the best, and here is a great example. I am hoping to catch a east coast based DCC in the future as their cutting edge presentations look amazing. Understanding all of it is another story,

Making an animated RSS feed for QRZ & 73s page.

How to post your RSS feed on your qrz.com or 73s.org page:


Have you ever wanted to keep your qrz.com or 73s.org pages updated with a dynamic widget showing the most recent entries from your blog? Then a RSS feed may be what you are looking for. This simple syndication tool is a very easy but powerful tool for making your website/blog content available in multiple places quickly. In the tradition of amateur radio Elmer-ing, I am writing this post to let you know how I am using this tool. You may find it helpful in your Ham related project also. With some simple copying and pasting, you too can have these automated tools helping you share you amateur radio experience.

Disclaimer:To be clear, I am not a web guru, and all advice here is offered as an example of what I have done and has no warranty either implied or otherwise. My goal is to share what I have learned in order to encourage more amateur radio blogging & twittering because the web is one of our best resources.

One of the easiest way to share your work in "Hamology", as Gordon West calls it, is to start with a blog with an automatically generated RSS feed. Any of the major blogging engines these days have this feature so that is not an issue. (List available at bottom of post) The RSS feed itself is a small XML document listing the titles and URLs of items on your blog in chronological order. Once you have found your RSS feed location, just start a Feedburner account and point it toward the file to take advantage of the options the service provides. The Feedburner help section covers this in much more detail.

What you can do with your feed:
Now that you have your RSS feed setup, you can start leveraging the power of Feedburner to help promote your blog on your qrz.com or 73s.org bio page. Click on the "Publicize" tab of your Feedburner account to find the option we are working with.
Once you are in the "Publicize" tab, just click on "Headline Animator" and follow the instructions to create a animated headline like the one I have at the top of this post.
In order to add the animated headline to my qrz and 73s pages, I selected "Other(just gimme the code)" and posted the resulting HTML code into the pages. In my case I unchecked the " Grab this link" check box from the resulting pop-up window for a cleaner look.




Below I have screen shots of the resulting widget additions to my qrz and 73s pages.
I hope you have found this post helpful.

Resulting 73s.org and qrz.com pages:

List of free blog sites that offer RSS feeds:
Blogger
WordPress
LiveJournal

In the next post, I will cover automatically adding your blog content to your Twitter page. Please share your ideas/corrections in the comments section.

Ham Radio has been "Slashdotted"

Slashdot is a website I have been reading for years and I was very happy to see it running a story of the NPR report on the changing population of amateur radio operators. This brings together two of my favorite things, nerdom and news. After seeing report after report over the years about the future disappearance of amateur radio, comparing our hobby to a finite product like VHS or 8 track tape, it is so refreshing to see a report about the progress we are making in building our numbers. It is very easy to gloss over the "antiquated hobby" of amateur radio. But when you learn that people are using Morse code and digital modes on their own transceivers built into Altoids cases transmitting across the globe on just 5 watts of power, or working with the military on open source Software defined radio platforms, the argument of amateur radio as a dying hobby does not hold water. This hobby of ours has so much to offer people from all walks of life. Just last month we added a few more people to the ranks of the Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club or HoSARC. I have a feeling we will look back on these days as the start of a new era of amateur radio. I can not wait to see what is next for our hobby.

ARRL.org redesign getting off the ground soon!

As per the ARRL website the redesign and launch is headed toward completion! I for one am looking forward to the new site. They have been working on it for some time and it promises to be a big help for promoting our hobby. I was calling ARRL regarding an unrelated matter and a member close to the project was nice enough to tell me that this weekend should see a change in one of our favorite web watering holes.
Update:4/8/10
Looks like April 12 is the new go live date.
The new www.arrl.org is now live!
And it looks great! The interface looks smooth and up to date. Each day you can see that they are adding new features and tidying up loose ends. It was not a small job, but I think it is a significant step in the right direction. The archive information is easier to find and access. They even tell you how many days are left on your subscription! Nice job all around.